Johnson’s lock-down delay likely to cause more than 60,000 needless deaths, study finds

Johnson’s slowness to accept the inevitable has set UK on a path to huge avoidable tragedy

Boris Johnson’s slowness to act on a lock-down of the UK to combat the spread of the coronavirus has cost over 60,000 lives, according to a new study published to the Medrxiv site pending peer review.

The holes he has left in anti-transmission measures, such as:

• ignoring World Health Organisation recommendations on testing, tracing and isolating infected people
• failing to provide protective equipment to NHS staff in spite of abundant availability among UK firms being ignored by the government
• sending back infected elderly patients to care homes and
• the continued arrival of untested air passengers from coronavirus hotspots

are likely to increase that number.

The study took the UK’s initial confirmed situation on 28 February – and its modelling was a good match to the actual situation by 23 March, the day before the UK lockdown:

Applying the estimated parameter values and assigning hospitalised cases on 28 February as 10 severe, 4 critical, and 5 recovered, the constrained Maximum Likelihood estimates for that date are 1627 infected and 532 mild (see Methods) and the predictions give a reasonable approximation to deaths in the period to 23 March.

The study modelled the spread of the virus, at different levels of lock-down and with varying lock-down dates, and found that locking down just a week earlier would have led to an eventual death toll in this phase of the pandemic of around 18,500 – compared to an expected 81,000 under Johnson’s eventual 24 March start date:

An extract of the report explains:

Figure 2 shows the results of a model run with these initial conditions, and a lockdown assumed to reduce [transmission factors] to 20% of its estimate throughout a 12 week period 24 March – 16 June. Severe cases rise throughout the lockout, reaching nearly 63,000 by the end. Likewise critical cases rise throughout, reaching nearly 37,000, and total deaths exceed 81,000.

…

These results are very sensitive to the starting date of the lockdown. If the 20% lockdown began one week earlier, on 17 March, cases and deaths would still rise throughout the 12 weeks but the totals on 9 June would be around 16,500 severe and around 9,250 critical cases, and 18,500 deaths.

And if Johnson’s lockdown had been more complete – plugging the gaping holes listed above, then the total deaths would have been lower still. The study found that reducing the transmission factors to 10% of their original value before the lock-down instead of 20% would reduce the total deaths to a fraction of the likely outcome now:

For a 10% lockdown beginning on 17 March, severe cases peak on 26 March at under 5,900 whilst critical cases peak on 5 April at 2,800 and total deaths by 9 June are 5,200.

Astonishingly, in February Johnson was boasting about his plans to avoid any kind of prevention measures – claiming that this would give the UK an international business advantage:

The full report and extract can be read here.

The SKWAWKBOX has always warned that Johnson’s ‘herd immunity’ plan – which involves almost everyone in the country becoming infected – was never abandoned and that the Tories and their media allies had simply started using new language to describe it.

That continues to be the case, as the government’s half-hearted and tortoise-like move to a lock-down – in spite of knowing 6 years ago what would happen if a pandemic hit a UK whose health and public services have been fragmented and stripped to the bone – demonstrates. But the scale at which Johnson’s recklessness and laziness are costing UK lives is glimpsed in a study that crystallises the impact of even just a week of Tory foot-dragging, dishonesty and incompetence.

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